Today in class we discussed the Open Education movement and resources being made available to teachers to help improve access to and quality of things like textbooks, lesson plans, etc. We talked about it briefly, but it inspired other questions for me.
- How is content creation monitored in terms of textbooks? I suppose I wondered what that would look like in terms of teacher created textbooks and the amount of work it might require for peer review. I also wonder how provinces would monitor content in terms of parity district to district, or even school to school. It is definitely something I’ll be looking in to.
- How do we ensure equal access? Of course there would be equity in the classroom if the school provides laptops, however this could become problematic in terms of what devices students have access to at home.
I do think that this shift to open educational resources will be revolutionary in terms of guaranteeing up-to-date resources and that the transition from print to digital is inevitable, I suppose it’s just some of the logistical issues that raise concern for me.
One resource that we were shown today that really intrigued me was https://archive.org/web/. My teaching area is social studies, and in the few minutes I spent navigating the webpage I found countless valuable resources. This page provides an accessible way for students to engage with historical documents/audio/video – which is so cool. I’m excited to integrate this source into my lessons.
